Losing @2014ClubNats

I don't have much time to make this post as substantial as I'd like it to be, so I apologize. Be happy with what you get!

I've done a whole lot of losing lately. Moving from Fredericksburg to Charlottesville, I entered a much more competitive realm. While Tim Young is certainly the best runner ever to come out of that place, he didn't race locally very often. And the old guys who were fast when I was younger just kept getting older, and the young guys who were faster weren't racing either. As a result, I won a lot.

I haven't won very much in the last few years. I won a half marathon in October this year and I think it's the first race I'd won since the Pepsi 10K in 2012. Well, this weekend, I raced the USATF Club Cross Country Championships at Lehigh University. It was the largest field in Club Cross history, with over 600 men entered in the Open race, and 68 something like 70 teams. Over the 10,200 meter cross country course, I ran 33:37 for 314th place! Ridiculous! KC told me on the phone to try to finish above the 500s, and I'd told her I wanted to run under 34 minutes, so it was a successful day. Our Ragged Mountain Racing team finished 30th 34th (tentatively, results subject to change), so we beat half of the field.

Losing to 313 people was insane. I've never been in a field that deep since I started running for real.

My last USATF xc race went very poorly and I was only 112th (out of 168 finishers). I also ran really slowly that day compared to this weekend (5:51 pace vs. 5:18 pace). The only time I can think of that I lost to MORE people in one race was at the Boston Marathon in 2004, when I was running my second (and slowest) marathon ever and I got 423 out of 16,743. Add 313 and 111 together and we're almost equal (random math fact that is almost cool but not because it's not the same...).

Anyway, I hope I don't lose as much next year. Hopefully I'll be injury free from start to finish and maybe win something. There's always July 4th...